Abstract:This paper explores the relation between two perspectives on the nature of human rights. According to the “political” or “practical” perspective, human rights are claims that individuals have against certain institutional structures, in particular modern states, in virtue of interests they have as members of them. According to the more traditional “humanist” or “naturalist” perspective, human rights are pre-institutional claims that individuals have against all other individuals in virtue of interests characteristic of their common humanity This paper argues that once we identify the two perspectives in their best light we can see that they are complementary and that in fact we need both to make good normative sense of the contemporary practice of human rights. It explains how humanist and political considerations can and should work in tandem to account for the nature, content and justification of human rights.

Abstract:What should our theorizing about social justice aim at? Many political philosophers think that a crucial goal is to identify a perfectly just society. Amartya Sen disagrees. In The Idea of Justice, he argues that the proper goal of an inquiry about justice is to undertake comparative assessments of feasible social scenarios in order to identify reforms that involve justice-enhancement, or injustice-reduction, even if the results fall short of perfect justice. Sen calls this the “comparative approach” to the theory of justice. He urges its adoption on the basis of a sustained critique of the former approach, which he calls “transcendental.” In this paper I pursue two tasks, one critical and the other constructive. First, I argue that Sen’s account of the contrast between the transcendental and the comparative approaches is not convincing, and second, I suggest what I take to be a broader and more plausible account of comparative assessments of justice. The core claim is that political philosophers should not shy away from the pursuit of ambitious theories of justice (including, for example, ideal theories of perfect justice), although they should engage in careful consideration of issues of political feasibility bearing on their practical implementation.

Pablo Gilabert is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Concordia University, Montreal.

Excerpt:"Given the extraordinary level of his philosophical achievements, John Rawls was by all accounts a remarkably modest man. Those who knew him personally recall Rawls’s humil­ity as perhaps his most characteristic trait. [....] Steven B. Smith has even argued that Rawls’s "very modesty and lack of speculative curiosity are what exclude him from the ranks of the great philosophers". [....] This essay will focus, not on the role that Rawls’s modesty played in the presentation of his own ideas, but on the role it plays in his interpretations of the other canonical texts under examination in his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. It argues that the personal virtue of humility stands in a complicated relationship with the preeminent hermeneutic virtue of interpretive charity: the principle (which Rawls repeatedly, explicitly endorses throughout his Lectures) that a text must always be read in its intellectually strongest form. Sometimes, interpretive charity is taken to imply that a text ought merely to be read in its most consistent form. Yet while this approach has the benefit of charitably reconstructing a text’s meaning without appeal to any standards outside the work itself, mere consistency is neither necessary nor sufficient for philosophical excellence."

Monday, April 11, 2011

In a new essay on Habermas's thoughts on "Rationalization, modernity and secularization", Eduardo Mendieta gives us some information about Habermas's forthcoming book on religion:

"In autumn 2008, Habermas gave a series of lectures at Yale, which were followed the next autumn by another set of lectures, and a seminar at Stony Brook University on "Political Theology". That same autumn a workshop was organized on Habermas's recent work on religion for which he made available several large manuscripts of what appears to be the working draft for a book on religion. The workshop yielded a large manuscript of essays engaging Habermas's comprehensive rethinking of some of his earlier ideas and formulations on religion. One of the centrepieces of this working draft is a critique of modernization theory that links social progress to secularization. Here Habermas aims to show why secularization theory has been mistaken on several accounts and why we must attenuate and revise some of its major claims. At the very least if we are to hold on to the basic claims of modernization theory, we must uncouple them from strong "secularist" assumptions.This critique of modernization theory is matched by a turn towards the latest work on anthropology, ethnography and archeology that is theorizing the relationship between ritual, the emergence of mythological narratives and the evolution of human mind. These is also a long chapter on the Axial Age and the simultaneous emergence of universal, monotheistic religions and world-transcending philosophical perspectives."

Sunday, April 10, 2011

This book introduces the reader to the political theories of the American philosopher John Rawls. Rawls Explained sets out Rawls’s complex arguments in a way that makes them accessible to first-time readers of his hugely influential work. This book is both clear in its exposition of Rawls’s ideas and is true to the complex purposes of his arguments. It also attends to the variety of objections that have been made to Rawls’s arguments since it is these objections that have shaped the progression of his work.

Excerpts:"As I define perfectionist liberalism, following [Charles] Larmore, it is a species of a genus of liberal views that might be called “comprehensive liberalisms,” liberalisms that base political principles on some comprehensive doctrine about human life that covers not only the political domain but also the domain of human conduct generally. Most forms of comprehensive liberalism are perfectionist, involving a doctrine about the good life and the nature of value. But a doctrine can be comprehensive without being perfectionist." (....)

"Perfectionistic forms of comprehensive liberalism (whether utilitarian or Hegelian, or based on a picture of neo-Aristotelian virtue, or on Christian doctrines, or on one of many other possible views) have been immensely influential historically and remain so today. The Raz/Berlin position, avowedly perfectionist in Larmore’s sense, remains a particularly interesting and attractive liberal view, which deserves continued scrutiny (along with its various relatives)." (....)

"The major liberal alternative to Berlin’s and Raz’s perfectionist liberalism, in the recent Anglo-American philosophical literature, is the view called “political liberalism.” This view was developed first by Charles Larmore in Patterns of Moral Complexity and The Morals of Modernity, with explicit reference to Berlin, but in most detail by John Rawls in his great book Political Liberalism." (....)

"... although Rawls’s Theory of Justice is widely known, and frequently discussed in the literature on welfarism and utilitarianism, such is not the case with his great later book [Political Liberalism]. The concept of political liberalism is simply ignored in a large proportion of discussions of welfare and social policy, as are the challenges Rawls poses to thinkers who would base politics on a single comprehensive normative view. Many theorists influenced by various forms of normative utilitarianism have simply not attended to the issues of respect raised by their commitment to a comprehensive normative ethical doctrine as the basis for political principles and policy choices. It is certainly possible for consequentialist and welfarist views to be reformulated as forms of political liberalism. It also might be possible for them to defend their perfectionist doctrines against Rawlsian challenges. But the failure of their proponents to confront the issue head-on means that this work has not yet been done. It is my hope that the challenge contained in this article may stimulate this further work."Also see Martha Nussbaum - "Rawls's Political Liberalism. A Reassessment". Ratio Juris vol. 24 no. 1 (March 2011).

This is a speech given by Habermas on April 6 at a meeting on "Europe and the re-discovery of the German nation-state" arranged by the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). Habermas criticised political elites for shirking their responsibility of delivering Europe to its citizens, instead relying on opportunism that threatens to “sink 50 years of European history”. Former foreign minister Joschka Fischer also took part in the discussion. See Habermas's full speech here (pdf).

Monday, April 04, 2011

"Habermas and Rawls - Disputing the Political" (Routledge, 2011), edited by James Gordon Finlayson & Fabian Freyenhagen, includes a new article by Jürgen Habermas in which he comments on John Rawls's political theory and on the other contributions in the book.

Here are some excerpts from Habermas's "Reply to My Critics" (pp. 283-304):

"How far are morality, law and politics amenable to rational justification and how do they relate to the normative content of the ethical-existential life orientations and worldviews of individuals and communities? For my part, I follow Kant in assuming that, with the concept of autonomy, the practical reason shared by all persons offers a reliable guide both for morally justifying individual actions and for the rational construction of a legitimate political constitution for society. Kant understands "autonomy" as the ability of persons to bind their will to universal norms that they give themselves in the light of reason.

Rawls takes this individualistic and egalitarian universalism into account only in his exposition of a concept of political justice, however, wheread he situates moral conceptions on the particularisic side of the plurality of "comprehensive doctrines". Nevertheless, the "priority of the right over the good", as I understand it, sets the parameters in such a way that the concept of political Justice as Fairness is composed entirely of universalized contents that can also count as "morally" justified in the Kantian sense and are not shaped by values of a particular political culture." (p. 284)

"[There is however] a problem that, in my view, besets the construction of the "overlapping consensus". The correctness of the political conception of justice is supposed, on the one hand, to be measured by whether it can be integrated into the different comprehensive doctrines as a module; on the other hand, only the "reasonable" doctrines that recognize the primacy of political values are supposed to be admitted to this test. It remains unclear which side trumps the other, the competing groups with a shared worldview who can say "no", or practical reason that prescribes in advance which voices count. In my opinion, the practical reason expressed in the citizens' public use of their reason should have the final word here, too. This admittedly calls for a philosophical justification of the universal validity of a morality of equal respect for everyone. Rawls want to sidestep this task by confining himself to a "freestanding" theory of political justice." (p. 285)

"Rawls employs the concept of "freestanding" in a more specific sense when he refers to the independence of philosophical subdisciplines from one another. (....) The reason for Rawls's intention to insulate his theoretical program from controversies in neighboring disciplines has to do with the meaning of normative political theories. He hoped that this would enable the concept of Justice as Fairness to secure broad public acceptance. I am skeptical in this regard because each of Rawls's basic conceptual distinctions - moral versus political, rational versus full autonomy, the right versus the good, true versus reasonable, reasonable versus rational, truth versus objectivity, etc. - forces him to take positions in specialist discourses that reach far beyond the boundaries of political theory. Fallibilism and continued controversies on all fronts are the price to be paid for metaphysical abstinence" (p. 290)

See my previous post on "Habermas and Rawls - Disputing the Political".

Saturday, April 02, 2011

Habermas and Rawls are two heavyweights of social and political philosophy, and they are undoubtedly the two most written about (and widely read) authors in this field. However, there has not been much informed and interesting work on the points of intersection between their projects, partly because their work comes from different traditions — roughly the European tradition of social and political theory and the Anglo-American analytic tradition of political philosophy. In this volume, contributors re-examine the Habermas-Rawls dispute with an eye toward the ways in which the dispute can cast light on current controversies about political philosophy more broadly. Moreover, the volume will cover a number of other salient issues on which Habermas and Rawls have interesting and divergent views, such as the political role of religion and international justice.

The volume includes a new article by Jürgen Habermas in which he comments on the contributions.